The siddur was obviously old, its back cover tattered, the pages yellow and crumbling, the book bordering on moldy, but it was an object of pride to its owner. I was visiting a friend a few weeks ago, and he pulled the prayerbook off a shelf to show to me.

It was printed more than a century ago, in Hebrew, in some once-intensively Jewish city in Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement whose name I have since forgotten.